‘The UK’s importing of food is a travesty’: farmer’s wife Helen Rebanks tells her own story

Toby Helm
Sun, 27 August 2023 

Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

“I live with my husband, James, and we have four children – Molly, Bea, Isaac and Tom. There are also six sheep dogs, two ponies, 20 chickens, 500 sheep and 50 cattle to care for. I am a farmer’s wife, and this is my story.”

So writes Helen Rebanks on the first page of her debut book, The Farmer’s Wife. It is about her life with husband James managing four young children and a lot more animals on a 700-acre farm in the Lake District. James has already made his name as a bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral about traditional farming in Cumbria

Now it is Helen’s turn. Behind her portrait of a hard, though in many ways idyllic, life Helen believes all is far from well for UK farmers. Interviewed before the book’s launch, Rebanks is scathing about how Brexit and its aftermath have destroyed farmers’ livelihoods, and in some cases their lives.

“Farming is going through a huge challenge with the government post-Brexit,” she says. “Since the 1950s farmers have been encouraged to produce, produce, produce and have been supported. But then came the catastrophe of foot and mouth disease and there was rebuilding for some: others went out of business. Farmers have relied on EU subsidies which, however imperfect, were at least a system – basic payment for the land you farmed. But that has been incrementally reduced year on year, so farmers’ income keeps coming further down.”

She is particularly critical of the government’s trade agreements with non-EU countries that were supposed to create a new “global Britain” in which farmers and everyone else running businesses would thrive after Brexit.

Instead they find imports are now undercutting homegrown produce. “The most recent is Mexico for eggs – from battery hens,” says Rebanks. “Our egg producers are going out of business because feed costs, heating, lighting, energy costs – everything to do with production – has gone up. There are fewer British eggs because supermarkets won’t pay the true cost of production. How are farmers supposed to make a living?”

Related: Farmer’s wife Helen Rebanks: ‘There was a fire in me about speaking up for the women who hold things together’

For some farmers, it has proved too much. “A lot of farmers are trapped in awful circumstances with not enough staff,” she says. “It is no surprise the suicide rate is at an all-time high. The government’s importing of food is a travesty. I don’t want to eat an apple that has been shipped in a cold store for months from New Zealand, or chicken in a supermarket sandwich that has possibly come from Thailand.”

• The Farmer’s Wife by Helen Rebanks will be published on 31 August by Faber (£20).